


you just keep me hanging on

by Kypros



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: (Minor) Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington Friendship, Burned-out Steve Harrington, Developing Friendships, Everything Moves Slow, Feelings Realization, Gentle Jonathan Byers, M/M, Male Friendship, Post-Season/Series 03, Post-adolescence, Realistic Life Expectations, Slice of Life, Small Towns, Steve Harrington-centric, Twenty-Somethings Figuring Out Life, emerging sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 11:44:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21270512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kypros/pseuds/Kypros
Summary: Lou Reed once said that the perfect day was spent drinking sangria in the park and some poetic shit about how some girl makes him feel like he was someone else and someone good. Steve doesn’t drink sangria but he likes cheap gas station beer, and when he sits with Jonathan on the outskirts of town at the edge of the quarry cliffside, he makes it so he can forget himself. It’s far from perfect, but in the post-adolescence lurch of small town life, it’s the best that Steve can hope for.





	you just keep me hanging on

He’s washed up. Twenty-three. With a dead end job and no love life and no real plans for his future.

Does ordering a pizza this coming Friday night count as future plans? Cause he could really do for a greasy slice from Lorenzo’s. In fact, he’s been thinking about it all week.

Steve Harrington—the jock, the hair, the face, the car, the name: all of it, all the identifying monikers—was all used up and gone straight to hell. He was still working at the same video store, still not really liking it, still not really _getting _it, but it’s a job dammit, and every burnt-out high school sports star needs one. Besides, it's not _that _bad, really: it's steady work, and it pays the bills.

He's thankful because the job is by no means hard. Most of his time is spent dusting shelves and rewinding video tapes. The most difficult part of the job is remembering how to ring in those stupid TV guide coupons that people present occasionally for a 2-for-1 rental special. The routine also involves sometimes bringing in coffee for the older, heavy-set woman named Lydia, whom he works morning shifts with on the weekends. He’d almost call her a friend, but she’s forty-something and hanging out a woman old enough to be his mom outside of work hours would be _weird._

Beyond chatting with Lydia, there’s not much else to it. Robin? She’s gone. To some nice, well-to-do music school out east. She was smart enough to realize that working for minimum wage for the rest of her life wasn’t going to cut it. She comes home now and then, and she and Steve will crack a six pack of beer and smoke a few joints, but relying on a best friend for company who is only in town twice a year sucks.

Instead, he tries not to think about it.

He tries not to think about it and tries not to let his own disappointments get to him. Those silly but wonderful adolescent dreams he had of playing for the Indiana Pacers? Of marrying Debra Winger or Michelle Pfeiffer or maybe even Kathleen Turner? Of almost maybe winning the approval of his dad? They've all been lost and they’re all undone and none of it matters because he peaked at seventeen and every moment since then has been nothing but the monotonous motions of a bored twenty-something, done day in and day out.

It goes like this: get up, go to work, stop at the Value-Mart on the way home for a frozen TV dinner, watch some late night TV, and go to bed. Rinse and repeat like the label tells him to from his not-so-fancy bottle of dollar store conditioner that he uses these days. It's all okay though, because he resigned himself to that of placating mediocrity a long time ago (that summer he found out he didn’t get into a singular college _anywhere_) and he’s known since he was ten years old that he was never going to be famous. Boyish, childhood dreams were just that: dreams. He’s never marrying the hot superstar actress. He’s never moving to a mansion in Montana. He’s never leaving Hawkins, small-town Indiana.

All of those wants and things were just dreams. All of them were unobtainable. And in a weird, strangely comforting sort of way, he’s actually (really) okay with it.

As he sips on cheap beer to the tune of the late night news, he tells himself that some people weren’t meant for bigger things. That some people had to be the standard in which others compared themselves to. That some people needed to work shit jobs in shit towns and be the shit benchmark for others success. Like—_oh yeah_, Steve Harrington? Remember him? Yeah, thank _god_ I didn’t turn out like he did.

He gets that a lot. That kind but unkind pity. Old faces from high school, slipping in and out of town in timed shadow visits to visit family and old friends and stopping by just for funerals. All for very quick moments. Just for the day or the weekend, or sometimes even just hours. As though those who left were somehow scared that the quiet, small town mentality might somehow suck them back in in those scarce moments that they dared to stop and think.

A lot of the time, people don’t ever expect to see him there. Steve, that is. Walking down Main Street with his coffee for Lydia, or buying groceries one sad bagful at a time, or even just topping up gas into his slowly rusting out BMW. But when they do, the reaction is always the same: every face he ever has the pleasure of reintroducing himself to always wears the same poorly concealed look of bewilderment, followed by that stabbing wash of visible relief. Like _shit_: my marriage to Cindy might be on the rocks, but at least I didn’t end up like Steve, that poor bastard.

But it's not a bad thing (or so he tells himself).

If anything, it has allowed him to become good at small talk. Like, _oh, yeah, I still work at the Family Video store,_ and _mhmm, I didn’t go to college_, and_ yep, Hawkins is the same as ever. Mrs. Belanger? Oh no, she died. Vera Radford? Sorry – I haven’t seen her since high school. I think she married Nathan Yates and moved out west. You have kids now? Cool. Nope, I’m still single. You work in marketing these days? That’s great._

It’s all routine and it's all practiced lip service, and if he's being honest with himself, it's all that he's got. If anything, he’s _proud_ that he’s so good at it. He has to be proud of _something_, and being proud of his ability to let their pitying smiles roll off his shoulders like rainwater is the best he’s got. It’s mildly irritating, but like a damp shirt, he’s not going to let it ruin his day.

Which is why he hates it when Jonathan-fucking-Byers interrupts his perfect little bubble of small town monotony. Breaking that routine. Smashing his ability to remain indifferent in the face of practiced small talk. Jonathan Byers, with his shiny new degree in photojournalism, home for the summer to visit his mom (or something annoyingly privileged like that). In his irritation, he may have forgotten to ask.

Steve is sitting in the corner of the library where no one ever goes, not actually reading, not actually doing anything other than using the quiet space to flip through old _Popular Mechanics_ magazines for ideas on how to rewire his shitty old BMWs ignition column. Not that he has the capability to perform the repairs himself to begin with, but the idea is nice and the magazines are free. He does that a lot: kill time by thinking about nice things that he'll never actually be able to do.

His most recent time killer involves dreams about being practically handy. His car has been on the fritz again, and between calling his dad and asking for money for the repairs, or just suffering through the hassle of simply not having a car, _well_—he’d rather just walk. Some conversations, like how Steve's father thought he was a bigger fuck up than that bleeding heart, Jimmy Carter, just weren't worth the effort.

And then Jonathan Byers shows up.

The worst part is that he doesn't even notice him, and he doesn’t even know how long the other guy has been standing there. It might have 2 minutes, or it might have been 2 hours, but he wasn’t really paying attention and Jonathan startles the shit out of him.

“Hey, Steve. See you’re still in Hawkins, huh?”

Steve nearly jumps a foot and a half in his seat, but it only takes a moment for him to collect himself, trying—and failing—to act casually unbothered by Jonathan’s comment. It’s not like he hasn’t heard this particular sentiment expressed a million times before, in a million different ways, but for some reason the way Jonathan says it (so indifferently, so carelessly—like as if he had _expected _this of Steve) bothers him. Normally people have the decency to at least act shocked that Steve was still slumming around in Hawkins. But not Jonathan: no, Jonathan approached the conversation full on, no tact, no grace, like swinging a baseball bat straight to his knees.

An older part of him (the brash and young seventeen year old who at one point smashed Jonathan’s camera in the high school parking lot all those years ago) almost wants to snap at him and tell him to shut the fuck up.

Instead, he knows better. Practice. Routine. Lip-service. He won't let Jonathan get to him.

Instead, he goes for a smile and laughs in the same old way he’s used to, nodding with a lazy shrug of his shoulders.

“Yep, I guess so. Couldn’t resist the call of mediocrity. Rent around here is pretty cheap too.” Small talk. Gentle albeit humorous self-deprecation. He’s proud. He’s good at this. He’s not bothered.

Jonathan just looks at him and suddenly his deep brown eyes are peering through him like he has unscrewed the top of Steve's head and is cataloguing his every thought and hope and dream that he's ever had. Analyzing him. Dissecting him. Acutely realizing that everything he ever wished for was all gone and flushed away in the cracked, dirty toilet of the dumpy old video store.

Steve sucks in a breath. He's waiting for the wash of relief to manifest itself now—expecting it, really. To see that visible, "_Oh-thank-God-I-don't-have-it-as-bad-as-Steve-does_" look plastered across the fine lines of Jonathan Byers stupidly familiar looking face.

It never happens.

Instead, Jonathan tells him with a shrug of his own: “I mean its okay, I’m back too. I paid $15,000 to learn that mediocrity is underrated.”

Oh. _Ok. _

No one has ever responded like _that_ before.

Steve stares. He stares and Jonathan stares back, and they could go on staring forever except this is when Steve bursts into sharp, sudden laughter.

He laughs like he’s never laughed before, excluding that one time on his sixth birthday when his mother tripped into his dad while carrying his three-tiered birthday cake. He laughs and laughs, wheezing and red-faced with tears streaming from his eyes.

“Shit, Byers: I forgot how funny you could be.”

Jonathan smiles indulgently, chuckling a little too.

“I’ve got a whole standup routine based around dormitory living, too. Never thought I’d say this, but I actually missed Hawkins.”

And Steve? Steve just keeps laughing. He can’t keep it together, not even for a second, not even enough to say anything back in return.

“See you around, Steve,” the other man eventually says, but Steve doesn’t hear him. Jonathan Byers actually _missing _Hawkins? Missing here? Missing _this _place? This proverbial garbage heap of a town where the young only come back when they were old enough to die? It was such a joke. All of it.

The librarian kicks him out when he can’t stop laughing, but in all honesty, he doesn’t really care.

\---

After the library incident, Steve takes to going to Jonathan whenever he is feeling suffocated and wants to get away from the fawning loneliness of his too quiet apartment. He discovers fairly easily that Jonathan has taken a part-time job waiting tables at the diner near the Value-Mart. Making small talk is cheap after all, and Steve is the best at what he does.

Besides, visiting the restaurant makes for a great excuse for Steve to talk with Jonathan without seeming too interested (and to eat something that isn’t microwaved). So in between sips of coffee and stodgy bites of over-buttered mashed potatoes, Steve is able to glean from Jonathan that in the post-graduate world of photojournalists, the job market wasn’t so hot. Neither were the housing markets.

During the quieter moments, Jonathan is also able to talk at length about the 1982 economic recession and the domino effect and about things that Steve doesn’t quite understand, like about rent prices in New York, and how even with a full time job, he couldn’t afford it. Also about a bank loan that he had taken out in 1986 to pay for said schooling that he couldn’t get a job with now, and how the interest rates weren’t so great.

So yeah—_Hawkins? _Great place. Rent free living at home and small enough that he was able to take shitty part time jobs like the one at the diner without sucking the manager’s dick for it.

Steve had nearly choked on his coffee when Jonathan had told him that one.

“That’s a lie,” Steve had shot back, wheezing. “They don’t make you suck dick for jobs in New York.”

Competitive job markets be damned, Steve wasn’t buying it. Jonathan however, while refilling his empty mug of coffee to the brim, had merely raised a lone brow and allowed himself a small smirk.

“Twice. Once when I tried to apply for a job working in a deli, and another time for a job at a news stand.”

“Jesus Christ—they wanted you to blow a guy in order to sell sandwich meat?”

Jonathan had nodded slowly, resting a hand on the jut of his hip, his fingers absently twirling the length of a chewed up plastic pen.

“Yep.” Like _yep_, I sucked dick to get a job in New York. No big thing.

“You_ didn’t_,” Steve had gasped, and his mind was suddenly awash with irreconcilable images of Jonathan Byers on his knees, his face eye-level with another man’s crotch.

Again, Jonathan had just shrugged, not really answering him, but his nose had crinkled in distaste with the curl of his lips.

“So Hawkins,” Jonathan had whistled low and slow, neither confirming nor denying the questionable things he may or may not have done to get a job. “Not that bad.”

Steve had simply stared at him, eyes inscrutable and probing, as if he could somehow figure out through Jonathan’s slouchy posture alone if what he had said was true. Jonathan, slightly taller, slightly thinner, with cheeks that were slightly more angular and hair that was still impossibly messy despite spending four years away in a city where it was decidedly uncouth to cut ones hair with an old pair of kitchen scissors.

“You’re full of shit, Byers,” he had decided right then and there. Jonathan just smirked, reaching into his apron pockets for Steve’s bill.

“I’ll meet you at the register when you’re ready to pay,” was all he told him and he patted the bill down onto the table top. Steve on the other hand had tried not to think about the uncomfortable tightness of his jeans, or how it was _weird_ that Jonathan out of all people had elicited such as response from him.

He tried not to think about it and instead focused on the one irrefutable fact that had been on his mind since he broke up with Trixie Kingston six months prior: that _god_, he really needed to get laid.

\---

It takes another two full weeks for Steve to work up the guts to ask Jonathan if he’d like to hang out sometime, _not _at the diner. Not making small talk. The pleasantness of real food be damned, the cost associated with eating out every other day was really hurting his savings (or lack thereof).

And besides: Jonathan was the only familiar face he knew around town these days that _wasn't_ still in high school or like...fifty something. And he had a feeling (call it instinct or know how, or plain old simple intuition) that Jonathan's social life wasn't doing so great either. Steve knew very intimately that it was hard to make friends when everyone you ever knew (or at least the ones you could stand) had somehow made the great escape beyond the looming county lines of the town limits.

"You doing anything later?" he ended up asking, paying for his coffee to go.

Jonathan, like he always did when Steve spoke to him, had simply shrugged.

“I’m off work at six,” he had said, leaning heavily against the counter. “But uh, we can go for a drive, if you want,” he suggested.

So they do.

Steve discovers that Jonathan is a smoker now. He puffs on cigarettes like they are air, in and out, forever and always.

“My ex turned them onto me,” Jonathan offers as an explanation when he catches Steve staring at him for what must be the 5th time in a singular hour.

They're parked up near the old quarry, the old AM radio crackling as it struggles to pick up the signal through the swath of thick, leafy trees up in the hills.

“It’s a bad habit,” Steve responds with a smirk, taking a slow drag of his own and puffing the smoke out the window. Outside, the sun is setting, casting dark shadows down the length of the white shale cliffs. Steve watches as Jonathan allows himself a small grin but says nothing else, flicking ash into an empty plastic ashtray between them in the car console.

"Your cars still broken?" he then asks.

Steve nods, humming slow in response through the lick of his lips.

"_Yep._ Ignition is dead. Mice chewed through the wires, I think." It was a haphazard guess at best, but it seemed likely.

"It's an easy fix," Jonathan tells him absently. He fiddles momentarily with the radio, and when the signal continues to crackle, he shuts it off. "Just need a few new wires and some electrical tape.”

Right. And you know, a functional understanding of how cars work. Which Steve didn’t have.

"I'm about as useful at fixing cars as my dad is for being a decent person," Steve admits readily. Winning at the mediocrity game again, and losing to Jonathan Byers: score one point to Steve Harrington.

Jonathan let's out a small snort, his bones jumping beneath his skin and Steve smiles. It's a nice sounding laugh, the sharpness of it be damned.

Then: "I could take a look at it for you, if you wanted. Tomorrow, maybe?"

Steve eyes Jonathan speculatively, as though he didn't quite believe that the other man was all that qualified to be poking around under the hood of his old BMW, or maybe he was just enjoying how the other looked so alive in the golden hues of the setting sun, or maybe he was just thinking about how they were currently sitting in the Byers' old Buick that Steve had thought had been on its last legs while they were in high school together.

Getting Jonathan to look at his shitty old car couldn't hurt, he decides.

"I can't pay you," Steve settles on, licking his lips. "Mashed potatoes at the diner aren't cheap."

Jonathan chuckles.

"We'll work something out," the other man decides, and he flicks the butt of his cigarette out the window. It lands on the dusty gravel road next to the car, not quite extinguished.

Without missing a beat, Steve asks: "You're not gonna ask me to suck your dick, are you?"

Again, Jonathan snorts, bursting out into loud wheezing laughter, the same type of laughter Steve had felt the first time they met again in the library all those weeks ago.

“In your dreams, Harrington.”

Steve's tongue clicks and it comes out automatically:

“Only the wet ones.”

By the time Jonathan’s soft laughter fades, bleeding into the quiet sounding chirps of nesting birds in the surrounding forest, the sun has long since been swallowed into smooth maw of the distant craggy foothills.

\---

Jonathan dismantles the plastic shell encasing the steering column of Steve's car in less time that it takes him to swish a three-pointer: that is, in no time at all.

“You got a set of wire strippers?” Jonathan asks, pulling out steering columns' guts. It’s a thick bundle of reds and greens and whites and it almost reminds Steve of Christmas. But wire strippers? Steve squirms, fidgeting on the spot—admittedly he doesn’t know what tool it is that Jonathan is asking about, but if he had to hazard a guess, it was used to...strip wires. And his father always said he was too stupid to make anything of himself—_hah!_

“I’ll take your blank dead-eyed stare as a ‘no’,” Jonathan says in response to Steve's silence. Then, as he rips off the white plastic casing that pops the thin wire prongs into the ignition starter, he asks: “What about a knife?”

Steve nods—a knife he does have—but by the time he gets back down to the parking lot with the flimsy edged serrated steak knife with it’s partly melted plastic handle, Jonathan has already stripped the chewed wires using his car keys and was twisting together the new ends of the thin wiry copper to complete a new circuit.

“Tape?” Jonathan asks automatically from the driver's seat, and Steve fishes around the in the crinkly plastic Safe-Way bag Jonathan had brought over, tossing him the small black roll.

By the time Jonathan is finished, the wire guts are twisted and taped back together, neatly bundled and shoved back into the crevice under the ignition console. The time consuming part is trying to get the rigid plastic steering column coverings to snap back into place, and Steve watches mutely as Jonathan fiddles with the edges ever so carefully, puffing on a cigarette. Then, with Steve’s permission, he starts the car and the engine smoothly roars to life.

Well _damn_, Steve thinks. Jonathan had fixed his car like magic.

“All done,” Jonathan announces, and the engine shuts off as he slips out of the car. He hands him the keys, and even though his cheeks are slightly dirty from digging around in the dusty guts of his car console and there’s a thin red scratch on the back of his left thumb from where he scraped himself when stripping the wires, Steve could almost kiss him.

_Almost. _

“Shit, you should open up a garage,” Steve whistles instead. “Thanks, Byers. Now how much do I owe you for the tape and stuff?”

There’s a thick second of silence before Jonathan blinks dully, slipping into one of his “_I-don’t-know”_ shrugs and Steve switches gears: screw kissing him, he wants to strangle him now.

“I’m serious, Jonathan,” Steve prods. “I know I said I couldn’t pay you for fixing my shitbox car, but at least lemme pay you for the materials.”

Jonathan kicks at the dirt beneath his shoes and shrugs again, lighting up a cigarette, the picture perfect image of nonchalance. And _god_, does it ever annoy him.

“The wires and tape were like $5, Steve. It’s not a big deal. I said I’d fix your car: don’t worry about it.”

Irritation rears its ugly head full force and Steve almost snaps again but settles for the diplomatic approach instead:

“Fuck that, man—let me buy you dinner at least. And you’re not allowed to say ‘no’.”

Well…semi-diplomatic. But there was nothing wrong with be aggressively nice, Steve tells himself, because like _hell_ he was going to let Jonathan Byers hold one up over him. He may have been rubbing shoulders with the working poor these days, but he sure as fuck wasn’t going to let that take away his pride from him. He had standards to upkeep, a name to hold high: Steve Harrington never was, and never will be a mooch.

“Fine,” Jonathan acquiesces. “But not at the diner,” he says, his nose wrinkling in distaste.

Steve's eyes narrow.

“What’s wrong with the diner food?” Sure, the potatoes were sometimes lumpy, and the coffee almost always sucked, but they made a mean tasting pork chop.

“The food looks like shit and tastes like shit? Mind you, I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Steve’s eyes narrow further, curious to know if this is going where he thinks its going. He gives in to the bait and waits.

“And why’s that?”

Jonathan, wiping the dust from his hands on the length of his old faded blue jeans, leans against the hood of Steve’s car and shrugs.

“‘Cause you’ve always had shit tastes,” he smirks and Steve presses his lips thin, holding back an undeserved chuckle. Yep: it went exactly where he was thinking it was going. Right on the nose, actually.

Steve chooses very pointedly to ignore the comment and moves on.

“Lorenzo’s?” he suggests as an alternative. It was almost Friday again, and he really wanted a slice of the greasy garbage that the pizzeria called “food”.

“No pineapple,” Jonathan counters and Steve feels personally attacked again.

“I see how it is: you’re one of _those _people.”

“‘_Those’ _people?” Jonathan asks, raising a lone brow.

“Pineapple-on-pizza hating people,” Steve says sternly. “The worst type of people. Worse than people who think ranch goes with pizza too.”

Jonathan considers this, his lips pursing into a thick frown. Then, they melt back into soft indifference, his deep brown eyes blinking slowly.

“I like ranch with my pizza,” is all he offers, and Steve presses a heavy hand to his forehead, fingers perched on the bridge of his nose.

“I want you to retract what you said earlier,” he mutters testily. “About me having ‘shit tastes’: yours are worse.”

Jonathan snorts.

“Debatable.”

“There’s nothing to debate! Your taste in pizza sucks!”

Sharply, Steve feels like he’s a teen again, all of seventeen and young and arguing with Nancy over something silly, like how she had that annoyingly cute habit of dipping her salty albeit cold fries into his milkshake. Only it’s with Jonathan. And they’re not a couple. And it's about pizza. And the way that Jonathan was so blindly and unflappably _cool _about everything these days bothered him. Only he doesn’t have the time to think about that, or what it means and instead he huffs, picking up the crinkly Safe-Way bag and shoves it into Jonathan’s chest.

Their fingers make contact for all of two seconds as Jonathan takes the bag and Steve can’t help but think how incredibly warm they feel.

“Let’s go,” Steve huffs, heading towards Jonathan’s car. "Lorenzo's closes at 8." He slips into the passenger seat and doesn’t try to hide his mounting irritation when Jonathan’s airy chuckles make his cheeks burn red.

\---

He learns that Jonathan’s most recent ex was a guy named Tony. That he and Nancy had broken up during their first year of college, because neither of them could handle the distance. That Tony had been a few years older than him, and little bit wiser than him, and that despite this, Tony had been caught with his pants down in a subway station bathroom near 5th avenue with some other guy they went to school with.

Dumping his cheating ex-boyfriend had been the first in many small events that had led Jonathan home to Hawkins. At least that's the way Jonathan made it seem. If anything, he's one hell of a story teller, and is able to effortlessly weave together all the small inconsequential moments into a grander narrative that somehow, despite their inconsistencies, make sense.

Steve simply listens and doesn't make a big thing about any of it, only commenting that Tony sounded like a dick, and Jonathan gives him this _look,_ like he's not quite sure what to make of Steve's indifference to him dating another man.

Steve also learns that Jonathan has this habit of dissecting his food like he’s dissecting a frog: he does it methodically and quietly and it’s only when he catches Jonathan peeling off greasy slices of pepperoni and eating them separately after the fact does Steve catch on. He doesn’t say anything about it though, and lets Jonathan continue to eat his pizza in his weird decidedly not-how-you-eat-pizza way, washing it all down with the cheap beer they picked up from the gas station down the road.

In return, Steve shares his experiences about Trixie (and Lola, and hell, even that one girl Sandy he dated for a hot quick second back when he had just turned twenty), and how all of them eventually wanted the same damn thing, and how that _thing _was something that Steve wasn’t ready to dip his toes into yet.

“So you dumped them all because they wanted to get married?” Jonathan asks with quizzical stare.

“And buy a house. _And,_" Steve asks, drawing out the last part, "Don’t forget about the kids."

Jonathan purses his lips together and stares.

“It doesn’t sound _that_ bad.”

Steve is forced to hold back a thick, ugly sounding snort.

“Man, I work at the video store for min wage and can barely pay my monthly rent. Buying a house and having a kid? Not on the table, dude.”

He might have been called dumb in the past but he wasn’t _that _dumb.

Jonathan seems to change his mind on the matter and hums genially, nodding, like “I get it,” before taking another sip of his beer. It’s a nice gesture, Steve thinks, but ultimately meaningless, even if together they were broke and twenty-something in solidarity. At least Jonathan had hopes of a future one day. Jonathan had a degree. Steve had...5 years’ experience in rewinding VHS and BETA tapes.

They finish their meal in silence, Steve gathering their empty plates when they’re done and setting them in the empty kitchen sink. Then, Jonathan is gathering his things—his jacket, his keys, his shoes--and Steve walks him to the door.

“So pizza again next week?” Jonathan suddenly asks, and this time it’s Steve’s turn to shrug. The question is unexpected, but not unwanted. He'd actually been about to ask Jonathan the same thing. And if he’s being honest with himself, it’s nice to have something to look forward to.

So he nods.

Pizza with Jonathan again sounded...great. Even if his taste in pizza was bad, and even if he had a weird way of picking apart each slice while eating it, sharing dinner with Jonathan was arguably better than eating alone.

Jonathan smiles slowly and shoves his hands deep into his coat pocket.

“Cool—I’ll bring more beer next time.” Like _cool_\--we’re kind of actually friends now. No big deal.

Then, he’s gone, disappearing into the shadows of the dark apartment stairwell above the Walgreens pharmacy. Steve blinks, closing the door and slouches heavily against the laminate kitchen counters and taps his foot, trying to will away the odd feeling of tightness in his chest.

He has dishes to do, he thinks. And it’s not just a singular fork from eating out of a microwaved waxy cardboard box.

\---

Friday night pizza at Steve’s becomes a thing. Their thing. A thing like getting up and showering and driving to work, Jonathan always shows up at his apartment on Friday's with a pizza from Lorenzo's. One time he even brings one with pineapple on it, only to pick off each and every piece from the slices he eats, piling them errantly onto a crumpled paper napkin. Steve eats the discarded pieces like candy and Jonathan calls him weird.

Then, four Friday's into their routine, and despite both of them having to work early the next morning, they get inexplicably drunk arguing about cats.

It’s a really stupid thing to get worked up about, let alone something to get so trashed over, but you see—

Jonathan has this really dumb belief that having a cat would somehow be better than having a dog and it’s like,_ really? _Hating pineapple on pizza and now this?

Jonathan couldn’t be any worse of a person.

Cats were selfish and uncuddly and only used you for food. A cat would eat your body if you died, Steve tells him. A cat would even eat your face. Dogs? One hundred times better. A thousand, even. A dog might even call 911. Hell—a dog might even give you CPR.

There a good eight beer in each, the pizza all but forgotten, and Jonathan coolly tries to defend himself, explaining that: yeah, well at least I’m not into _fish_ or something stupid.

"I had a fish as a kid," Steve tells him flatly, cracking another beer.

"My point exactly."

Ouch.

“You suck, Byers,” is all Steve can think to say. “You and your pineapple-on-pizza-hating, cat-loving ways just suck. Plain and simple.”

“Not as much as you,” Jonathan shoots back. His quip is decidedly lame. Jonathan is too drunk to be witty at this point and Steve just smirks, his grin growing wide, because he can’t really help it, not really—and he takes another swig of his beer, his stomach feeling warm.

He likes it when Jonathan is like this. It makes it easier to bother him. And if there's one thing Steve loves, it's getting under the thick of Jonathan's skin. It makes things interesting between them and their constant ribbing between each other almost feels like the basis of real friendship. Besides: he really doesn't suck as much as Jonathan does, and Steve has _proof._

“You sucked a guy’s dick to work in a deli,” he points out. “Nothing—and I mean _nothing_—sucks more than that.”

Jonathan goes quiet for a moment, his face screwed up into a look of serious contemplation before he lets out a hiss of air. Then, he bursts like a bloated damn, laughter spilling forth in quick, sharp waves, and he kicks his feet up on the coffee table, nearly spilling the rest of his beer all over the thread worn carpet.

“You really think I did that, huh? Sucked a big fat dick in order to serve sandwich meat?”

Steve can't help but to blink. Well. _Yeah. _But for other reasons.

“Nah, man,” Steve responds in all seriousness. “You didn’t suck a dick to serve sandwich meat: I figured you did it to pay bills. No judgement.”

There's a moment of silence before Jonathan speaks, his voice incrementally sterner.

"Steve: have you been telling people this?"

"Uh…" Steve has to stop and think. "Only to Robin? She called last week, asking if I had any exciting news to tell her."

"And me sucking a dick was exciting news?"

Steve blinks.

"Yep...I guess?"

Jonathan's eyes narrow before he dissolves into laughter again, hysterical and wheezing.

“Jesus Christ Steve--you're such an ass. If I had wanted to make a go of it as a prostitute, do you really think I’d be back here in Hawkins?”

Steve chews on his lip, considering this. The market for prostitutes in a place like Hawkins probably wasn't _great._ Unless you were willing to sleep with..._ahem_...an older kind of clientele. Jonathan made a very good point.

“I guess not," Steve agrees and has the humility to at least act sheepish. But he's curious now, so he keeps on talking. "But is that like...a thing though? In New York City that is? Prostituting yourself for rent money?”

Again Jonathan pauses before he shrugs, slouching back into the couch. His feet slip off the coffee table and he reaches forward for another beer.

“I mean yeah, I guess. A jobs a job, Steve. Otherwise people would be giving sex away for free.”

_True_, Steve thinks, then a flippant drunken idea strikes him.

“Maybe I should try it.”

The words pop straight out of his mouth before he has time to filter them properly. Next to him, Jonathan sits up straight, visibly unsettled. His cheeks, Steve notice, are flushed from the alcohol. Or maybe just from what Steve had said. Less pale and warmer, like glowing ruddy apples or like red glaring stop lights.

_Man, _he suddenly thinks, his metaphors were so bad. No wonder Mr. Jenkins back in high school had said he should try and focus a little less on sports and a little more on English lit.

“...try what exactly?” Jonathan asks tentatively. Like he knew exactly what Steve was saying but really hoped that it wasn't the case.

“Having sex for money." His words come out bluntly and Steve watches as Jonathan’s whole body noticeably squirms, sinking into the scratchy couch cushions. "I’m good at it!" he insists when he sees Jonathan's face morph into shades of skepticism. "Ask any of my exes. Like so good I bet I could make a solid living out of it. Better then what I make at the video store...so what do you think? $50 a pop? $60? More if they want me to cuddle afterwards?”

Pressing his lips together to fight off another laughing fit, Jonathan settles himself deeper into the couch cushions, his body practically begging itself to be swallowed by the ugly plaid material. He grabs a pillow, crushing it to his stomach as though it too would somehow hide him, and he shakes his head. Curiously enough, he isn't looking at him anymore, and Steve traces his gaze to the dirty spot on the carpet near the radiator where Jonathan's eyes were glued.

He doesn't get what’s so interesting.

“You seriously didn’t just suggest selling yourself for money, right?" Jonathan then laughs, thumb tracing aluminum rim of the beer can. "Like, here in Hawkins? And what would you do? Hand out flyers? Hang up brochures down at the Value-Mart? Jesus, Steve.”

Despite the sudden tightness in Steve's chest, he beams brightly.

“All good ideas, Byers!”

“No! Those are_ terrible_ ideas." Jonathan’s creeping smile only makes the tightness in Steve's chest worse. “If Hopper caught you…” Jonathan bit down his lip and Steve can’t help but to think how terribly red his cheeks looks. Redder than a stop light now. “I’d pay to see that actually: Hopper just might die of embarrassment. Or be forced into an early retirement.”

His drunken minds does another flip-flop and Steve’s mouth starts talking again before he can even think.

“Which part would you pay for? Hopper’s face when he catches me wooing old Mrs. Hutchinson between the sheets or the actual sex part?” Steve grins.

Jonathan’s already rosy cheeks flush full on scarlet, the color spreading down his neck and he hugs the pillow harder, his arms pulled tightly across his lap. Steve feels satisfyingly embarrassed with himself.

They pass out a couple hours later, both squished into the same too small bed because Steve decided the couch cushion pillows were too thin and the backing too springy and also his feet hung off the end. Jonathan doesn’t protest and Steve doesn’t make a thing out of it, even when Jonathan drunkenly insists on sleeping with his shirt off, despite the fact that it's sort of weird and sort of intimate and not at all helping the weird chest tightness thing he sometimes gets when Jonathan is around. Instead, he discovers that Jonathan's chest hair is a light blond colour, and a quieter part of him, not yet unlocked by the fuzzy warm embrace of alcohol, wants to touch it.

He doesn't and falls asleep hiding any drunken longings, not saying a word.

When he wakes up the next morning, Jonathan is already gone, the beer cans collected neatly by the sink next to the half-consumed box of soggy pizza. There’s a note on the kitchen table too, and it reads: “_You should stratify your services: bed sharing is worth at least $10 a night”_

Thankfully, there isn’t any money left on the table next to it, but Steve lets out a small chuckle regardless. _God_, what an asshole though.

\---

"You think any of the people we went to high school with ever wake up in the morning and go: '_shit_: I've made a mistake?'"

Steve asks this question as the pair of them sit on the hood of Jonathan's car, perched high above the rock quarry. Between them is a six pack of crappy beer and as Steve finishes a can, he crumples it in his fist and sends it careening off the cliffside and into the reservoir below.

"You shouldn't litter," Jonathan remarks absently, but does exactly the same, flinging his empty beer can towards the lake. Then, he fiddles with the camera hanging around his neck—it’s a newer model then the one he had in high school, sleeker, and smaller—and after toying with the exposure levels through the lens for a few seconds, he snaps a picture of the empty expanse of space between them and the other side of the cliff face. Then, Jonathan leans back, furling his body against the curve of the windshield. "Also, what do you even mean? Mistakes _how_?"

Steve shrugs, pulling another can from the plastic ring pack, cracking the pop tab. The carbonated liquid lets out a quiet hiss and Steve takes a sip.

"Like. ‘Hating-their-life-choices’ mistakes," Steve clarifies. Beside him, Jonathan is staring absently at the overcast skies, his fingers fiddling with his belt loops. Jonathan does that sometimes, Steve realizes, when he’s really relaxed. Fiddling with stuff. Not even aware that he’s doing so.

Steve takes a deep breath in and continues.

"Ok, so remember Marnie Williams and how she got married to Mark Fenton right out of high school?"

"Mhmm.”

"Like…that.” Steve pauses, trying to think of what he’s really trying to say and realizes he’s not quite sure how to say it. It’s all there, all messed up inside of him, sitting quietly next to his dead-end job and his crappy apartment and his distance from his parents and _god_—why was this so hard?

“Do you think she's happy now, still married to the same dude who got drunk and pissed in the punch bowl at the sophomore spring fling?” he ends up asking. Yeah, cause that’s _exactly_ what he meant and _exactly _how he wanted to ask it. Steve blows out the heavy breath he had been holding in and next to him, Jonathan snickers.

"Fenton pissed in a punch bowl?"

Steve nods sagely but gives Jonathan a light shove to the shoulder: Mark peeing in the punch bowl at a high school dance definitely wasn't the point of his story. But then again, Steve had never really been all that great at explaining self. Small talk? Sure. Creating grand narratives that somehow tied together all the meaningless, inconsequential bullshit like Jonathan could? Nope, _never. _

"Not the part you’re supposed to be focusing on here, Byers,” Steve ends up saying.

"I mean it's _sort_ of important," Jonathan ponders. He props his hands behind his head, the hem of his shirt riding up an inch or two, exposing pale, smooth skin. The same smooth skin with the light smattering of blond hair that Steve remembers from some weeks ago, tawny and golden. Compulsively, Steve wants to pull it back down. His shirt that is. The tightness in his chest has returned and Steve grinds his teeth shut.

Then, Jonathan asks: "You ever wonder who drank that punch?"

Again, _not_ the thing to be focusing on, and Steve almost sighs.

"_Jonathan_," Steve huffs, and the other man purses his lips, his facing screwing up into a quiet look of contemplation. Like he’s actually be serious now. Actually giving thought to Steve’s jumbled, mixed-up words.

The skies above them are grey and hazy today and the meteorologist on the radio earlier had said they were calling for chances of rain. It didn't feel like rain though: it was too dry and too cool out, the winds nipping bitterly at his exposed knuckles. Not at all humid like when a storm was about to blow through. Despite that, Jonathan thought it would be nice of them to go up to the quarry for a drive.

Next to him, Jonathan sits up, propping his elbows on his knees. "I mean, we all make mistakes, Steve," he says. "It doesn't mean they have to define us."

Sometimes, Steve thinks, Jonathan isn’t as smart as everything says he is. Like suggesting they come up here, even though it was cold and windy and their time probably would’ve been better spent inside on the couch. At least then they’d be warm.

And even if Jonathan’s voice sounds soothing and calm, like he’s trying to placate all the anxiety that Steve is far too scared to ever express, Jonathan sometimes just doesn’t _get it_. Steve thinks about college and the places he never got to see or the people he never got to meet and how a part of him, despite his fake routine bravado, really did care about every pitying face that discovered the path of his sad little life in the dying hometown that they all swore to leave behind. Eighteen and burning so brightly, only to burn out and fade away.

He thinks about telling Jonathan this. About how maybe he isn't all that happy. How maybe he had made a mistake as a teen, and even now there’s no way to fix it, because he should have tried harder in school and stopped worrying so damn much about his dumb hair.

But then Jonathan adds: "But marrying a guy who got drunk and peed in a punch bowl at a high school dance was maybe one of those mistakes that you shouldn't have let happen in the first place," and Steve stays quiet, letting the din of the crackly fuzzy radio station from inside the car fill up the silence between them instead.

\---

They're walking down Main Street together, carrying not one, but _two_ bags of groceries from the Value-Mart (none of which contained a singular TV dinner, much to Steve's dismay) because Jonathan thinks he's doing Steve some sort of _favour_ by trying to teach him how to cook. It’s like, the 5th time that this has happened, and each and every time it ends with Jonathan getting so frustrated by Steve’s inability to follow instructions properly that he ends up making the whole damn meal by himself.

Today, Jonathan has decided that they are going for something simple. Because _maybe _trying to teach Steve how to make lasagna on the first go wasn’t the kindest thing to do. So they’re making mashed potatoes and pork chops, like “actual good tasting ones” (because Jonathan is _still _of the opinion that the ones Steve loves to eat at the diner are _terrible_), and Steve is trying to remain optimistic, even though Jonathan keeps talking about things like par-boiling and pan-searing and how it’s best to let the butter sit at room temperature and something about salting water, and none of it is making any sense to him.

“You’re doing it again!” Steve ends up blurting out mid-step, and Jonathan pauses in front of the pharmacy, turning on the sidewalk to give Steve this _look. _

“Doing what?” he asks slowly, like he doesn’t quite understand. Doing a weird walk? A weird talk? Doing nothing at all?

The bag of groceries in Steve’s hand is digging deep red grooves into the curve of his palm and he jostles it gently, his fingers straining at the weight. They're almost home, Steve thinks, but honestly, he doesn't think this can wait.

“Not making sense again,” Steve says quietly. He sucks in a breath and tries to figure out what he means to say, but then decides it doesn’t matter: he never makes sense anyways, so it all comes blurting out. “You’re like...talking too fast, and the stuff you’re talking about I don’t even know what it means, and..._fuck_, this is just a dumb idea, man. Can’t you just let me live in peace with my TV dinners and old reruns of Three's Company?”

Jonathan doesn’t say anything momentarily, his face blank and stare indiscernible. Then, he takes a step back towards Steve and he nods, like “_oh, okay_,” and Steve feels his face turn red, hot and burning from being to forced admit how _bad_ he is at something. It’s embarrassing and it’s stupid and he feels like he’s back in high school all over again, trying his hardest to understand what Mr. Jenkins was saying—trying, trying, _trying_, but not really getting it because everything the man said was so goddamn abstract. Or like when his father couldn't understand why Steve didn't _get _economics, and didn't _get_ the principles of projected global market rates and didn't _get_ why he had someone like Steve as his son. Steve working at his real estate company? Sure—but he’d fetching coffee for the _real_ employees for the rest of his days.

Math? Math he was good at. Math he could practice and rewrite and redo and study each and every formula because it was all so clear and all so concrete and there weren't all these bullshit little _what ifs _and _maybes _and all math was was memorization. Same with sports. He could run a lay-up a hundred times, and each and every time he’d get a little bit better at it, a little bit faster, a little bit sharper, and it wasn’t like he was going to walk out onto the court one day and find out that suddenly basketball was played with bicycles and by speaking in tongues.

He thought cooking might be the same, that maybe it was something he could just get better at by sheer force of will and unrelenting practice, but it was hard to follow along when your teacher was talking at you in a whole different language.

“_O_kay,” Jonathan says a second time, and he takes the heavy bag of groceries out of Steve’s straining left hand. Then, he bites his lip and allows himself a chuckle. “I’m not a very good teacher, am I?”

Steve blinks, because _um_, wow: that was unexpected, and he thinks he might have nodded. Like _yep_—you suck pretty hard, Byers—and the lines around Jonathan’s eyes crinkle as Steve's face turns white as a ghost.

God, he really was _such_ an ass.

“Shit, no--_um._ Don’t get me wrong: it’s really nice of you to try!” he spits out, and Jonathan shrugs handing him the lighter bag of groceries. Their fingers touch, a slow moment tempered by crinkly plastic, and Steve really likes it, really wants to touch him again, but between them there's no more excuses to make skin contact, at least not until they go upstairs to his apartment and get inside. Maybe then he can bump against Jonathan's shoulder while taking off his jacket. Maybe then Jonathan will brush by him with his bag of groceries on his way to the fridge.

“I’m not giving up,” Jonathan tells him firmly, cutting him off. “I’m just not..._hm,"_—he pauses, thinking briefly before easing into a soft smile. "Used to helping you,” is what he decides upon. “We’ll start over: tell me what you don’t understand.”

It's the kindest thing anyone has ever said to him.

Steve, in that moment, feels like a rug has been pulled out from under him. Jonathan’s response to his inability to get things was...different. Different then Mr. Jenkins, or his Dad, or even the way in which Robin sometimes used to roll her eyes at him when he had to ask her for the 3rd time in a week how to punch through a refund slip.

“Uh...like everything, dude,” Steve finds himself laughing. But it feels okay to say so. For the first time ever. Like he isn’t made to feel ashamed. “Okay, so pan-sear? What the hell even _is_ that?”

And Jonathan doesn’t laugh, and he doesn’t roll his eyes, and he doesn’t snicker and he doesn’t tell him he’s stupid or dumb or a failure or—

He just nods.

“_Okay_,” he repeats again, slowly and earnestly. “Let’s start there.”

\---

He’s talking to Robin on the phone for the first time in what seems like weeks, and she's telling him all about Juilliard, and her upcoming recital, and how next year she’ll be graduating and she’s _so _excited, but she doesn’t know what she’s going to do once she’s done—like, get a job? Stay in New York? Are there jobs in New York for musicians like her? What about as a translator?—and Steve is nodding and listening and spacing out the conversation with mentions of his life in Hawkins and Jonathan. Like, yep, he was the same; graduated, and yep, he came home, and he works at the diner now, and oh, did you know last Friday I finally got him to eat a piece of pizza like a _normal_ person? And on Tuesday we went to the quarry again and drank beer, and the week before that it was the junkyard, and oh _yeah, _I can actually sort of cook now.

“I can make scrambled eggs,” Steve tells her proudly. “And like...they actually taste _good_.”

Through the receiver he can hear Robin snort and as she quiets herself down, he can hear her crunching on something—_potato chips, salt and vinegar_, Steve thinks automatically, her favorite—before her voice picks back up again, loud and clear:

“So like, what—are you two dating or something?”

Steve freezes, his skin suddenly feeling hot and balmy against the hard curved plastic of the receiver cradled against his neck and he swallows back a thick burst of tightness that had just exploded from his chest.

“What? _No_. We’re just friends, Rob’,” he tries to explain.

Through the buzzing of the phone line, he can hear Robin snickering quietly to herself, a telltale sign that she thinks he's full of shit.

“Friends who have a weekly pizza date and go on lone drives to the remote destinations and fix each other’s cars and spend time together grocery shopping?” she croons.

She did make a valid point. Steve instantly diverts.

“Okay, to be _fair,” _he corrects her. “It’s Jonathan that fixes _my _car: you know I’m useless with that sort of stuff.”

There’s another muffled laugh, and even though Robin is over 1000 miles away, he can picture her unimpressed face, her eyes rolling so damn fast that they might threaten to pop right out of her skull and fall into her bag of chips.

“So you’re telling me,”—she drawls it out, nice and slow—"that even though neither of you are seeing anyone, and even though you both spend basically _all_ of your free time with one another, including each and every Friday night—which _hello! _That’s prime date night!—that you’re not dating.”

“We’re not,” Steve confirms, and he hates her for putting the dumb idea into his head in the first place.

“Even though he cooks dinner for you from time to time," she probes skeptically, if not a little teasingly.

“You've cooked me dinner before!”

“Only because you burned canned soup. Which, might I add, I didn’t even realize was possible.”

Steve stays silent for a moment before bursting into laughter: _shit,_ he had forgotten about that.

The conversation meanders slowly towards a different direction with Robin talking about this girl she met, and how pretty she is, and smart, and Steve nods, _mhmm_, and smiles when Robin talks about the bars she’s been to, and the cute bookstore she found tucked away behind her favorite noodle shop. And her voice sounds like a starling, airy and free, when she talks about this cool little concert venue she likes going to on the weekends, and how her French literature club is reading Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, only she doesn't really like it, but they're reading a novel by Victor Hugo next which she's excited for. He’s happy for her, he really is, and someday he hopes he’ll get to visit her. He knows she’s never coming back, even if she wonders like Jonathan what she's gonna do after graduation. Robin will somehow make it.

Robin, he thinks, with a name like a bird, was never meant to caged. Or something like that. It might be his best metaphor yet.

When she hangs up, promising to call again soon, Steve cracks a beer and thinks about his laundry, sitting unwashed in his room for a week straight. He really needs to find some quarters, he thinks. He’s running out of clean socks and his sheets are really in need of a change.

\---

Jonathan catches him pulling an overstuffed laundry basket from the backseat of his car outside the laundromat near the diner in a slight drizzle and wastes no time in telling him that the washing machines are going to pulverize his clothes.

“The machines are industrial,” he states flatly, casually leaning up against Steve’s car, sidling up next to him. “They’ll eat up your clothes.” He’s still wearing his work uniform: the same faded blue jeans and white-pressed dress shirt with the black hip hugging apron. He sort of smells like french fries, Steve thinks, and coffee too, and from the way his messy hair is pushed back and stuck in a slick wave across his forehead, Steve can only assume he’s just getting off work.

“Tell me about,” Steve laments. “Anything poly-blend or synthetic? It gets absolutely_ wrecked_.”

He doesn’t even try to follow the labels on his clothing anymore—perma press and dry clean? Hand dry and delicate cycle? It all means nothing and it all gets thrown into one big bundle, the colours be damned, to be chewed apart by the steady thrum of the quick moving 30-minute wash cycle.

“I made the mistake of trying to wash dress pants at a laundromat in New York once,” Jonathan tells him offhandedly. “I had this internship and there was this office dress-code...the machines tore the pants apart. It was late, so I couldn’t even try and go out and buy another pair.”

“_Shit,_” Steve whistles, setting down his basket of laundry on the trunk of his car. “What’d you do?”

“I rolled up the fraying hems and used a safety pin to keep my fly from popping open,” Jonathan smiles. Steve laughs and ends up shrugging, like _oh well_, and goes back to pick up his basket of laundry again.

“Well, not like a have a choice, Byers,” he shrugs. “My apartment doesn’t have on-site laundry, and this place is the only laundromat in town.”

“You could wash it at my place?” Jonathan suddenly suggests. Steve freezes, the laundry basket half-pressed to his hip, half-pressed against his car. “My mom’s at work, but I'm sure she wouldn’t mind. Also there’s a TV there to watch while you wait instead of flipping through dog-eared old magazines.”

Steve nods, like he’s considering this, then remembers what Robin had said on the phone the night before.

“No worries, man,” Steve beams, lying through his teeth. “My clothing is so fucked up that it can’t be saved at this point. Thanks for offering, though.”

Jonathan frowns.

“You sure?” he asks. He looks skeptical, like he can’t actually believe Steve has just turned down the offer of free laundry services _and_ the option of watching Sportsnet. Steve fidgets, trying not to bit his lip, and gives in.

“Um, I mean. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“I’m heading home now anyways,” Jonathan shrugs. “Leave your car here and I’ll give you a lift?”

Steve just nods. Okay. Yeah._ Sure._

\---

By the time they get to the Byers house, the drizzle has turned into a full on rain. The house itself however is pretty much the same as Steve remembers it from high school, only maybe a little bit more lived in, maybe a little bit more worn. The hole in the wall is gone, same with the blackened burn mark on the carpet, but the house as a whole seems to be sagging and tired, as though the memories of all the bad things that had happened here were finally catching up with it.

The interior is quiet and Jonathan introduces Steve to a beat up washer and dryer set, tucked in at the end of the hall, squeezed into the same room with the hot water tank and electrical panel.

“Um, the timer sticks on the dryer,” Jonathan warns him, lingering to his right. “So don’t set it past 40 minutes—if you’re clothing is still wet, just reset it."

“Ah, okay. I won’t be long: I’m just doing one load anyways.”

Jonathan nods and drifts back out into the hallway, disappearing into the bathroom. Through the walls, Steve can hear the sudden rattling of pipes and the familiar hissing spray of water.

_He’s showering_, Steve thinks absently, and he feels himself swallow thickly, his chest growing tight. He blinks and ignores the feeling, grabbing his basket of laundry off the floor.

True to his word, he doesn’t bother sorting his clothing and dumps all of it into the drum, bedsheets and all. He pours in the soap, the gritty albeit fragrant white particles vaguely reminding him of his mother and the way his sheets used to smell like lavender as a child. Only the smell is sort of off and it’s all sort of wrong, because the value brand Super Suds he uses isn't the same as Tide. The Byers, he notices, use Surf—the Tide knockoff brand—and he can’t help but to smile.

Maybe he should make the switch, he thinks. The thought bubbles to the surface of his mind and pops as he picks up the box, taking a small whiff. Surf smells like weird citrusy chemicals, but at least it's not lavender. And it kind of smells like Jonathan, which is nice, his brain sings. A lot better than being reminded of Tide and his childhood home.

Then, Steve sets the box down and shuts the lid. The shower has stopped and he turns on the machine, his right hand pressing down on the front of his jeans, willing the uncomfortable tightness straining through his boxers to disappear. He really needs to stop thinking like that, he thinks absently. About Jonathan that is. And _fuck, _he still hasn’t gotten laid, because it was really sad that the smell of laundry detergent has somehow turned him on.

All of this was just normal, he tells himself. He's just sexually frustrated. Maybe he should give Trixie a call this weekend…

It takes more than a few minutes of uncomfortable fidgeting and waiting, but when Steve finally emerges he finds that Jonathan is in his room. From the doorway, Steve watches—the other man was freshly showered and sorting through his own laundry with a quiet focus, picking up random pieces of clothing from a pile that had been tossed on the bed.

“Hey,” Steve tries. He doesn’t dare step in, an invisible curtain drawn between him and the intimate threshold that was Jonathan's private space. His room, Steve thinks, looks fundamentally unchanged from high school, only maybe a little neater. But there was still the same old posters on the walls, still the same old stereo and still the same old record collection. It was like when Jonathan had left for school, the room had entered a time warp. And even though it was almost weird to think of Jonathan living in room that was a museum to all his teenage trappings, its sameness was a testament to Jonathan's family's closeness: when Steve had moved out, his father had wasted no time turning his bedroom into a home gym.

"Oh...hey." Jonathan almost looks startled, as though he had somehow forgotten that Steve was in his house. "Uh, you can come in," he tells him, giving him a distracted look. He throws the shirt in his hand into the laundry basket at the foot of his bed. "I just figured I'd do some laundry too when you're done. Sorry about the mess."

Steve chuckles, cautiously entering the room and settles himself near the edge of the desk. Perched on top of a stack of photo envelopes was the Jonathan's newer Nikon camera. Next to it was the older Pentax that he had bought for Jonathan back in high school, cupped in a leather pouch. _Huh_—he wouldn’t have thought Jonathan still had it. He blinked and shook his head: that wasn't the point. Jonathan’s room wasn't even that bad, it just had lots of...stuff.

"You’ve seen my apartment, man." Then he adds: “I can’t believe you still have that old Pentax.” He can't help it—he's genuinely curious as to why it's still around.

Jonathan blinks and then just shrugs, absently rubbing the back of his neck.

“It’s a decent camera,” Jonathan tells him. “And nothing’s wrong with it: but the Nikon was a program requirement for NYU.”

Steve nods, eyes falling back to the old camera sitting on the desk, then to the sealed envelopes. He realizes he hasn’t ever really seen any of his photography since coming back from college, but he realizes very suddenly that he'd like to. He bets the photographs look great. Amazing, even. But before he has the chance to ask, Jonathan speaks again.

"And I mean, your apartment pretty tidy. Every time I come over, I get this weird feeling as if you don't even live there,” Jonathan smirks.

"It's not _that _clean."

Jonathan pauses, like he's trying to think, pursing his lips.

"I meant like…the lack of clutter. The organization," he eventually explains, hooking his fingers into his belt loops. "Your apartment reminds me of a showroom from a Sears’ catalogue."

Steve fidgets. Ah. _Ah. _

Memories of Tide and his mother come washing over him again and Steve swallows them all down.

"Oh, um, yeah...sorry."

"Sorry for what?" Jonathan asks, skepticism lacing his voice as his eyes narrow in confusion.

Steve shrugs.

"My apartment. It's a force of habit: my mom was this neat freak," he tells him, rocking on the balls of his feet. He doesn’t know where to put his hands, or why he suddenly feels so awkward, so they end up shoved into his pant pockets and clenched. "Still is actually. _Anyways_,” he whistles. “I guess I sort of picked that up from her."

He's waiting for it: the half nod or quietly judgmental "_oh, ok_" he used to get from people like Nancy when he tried to explain why it was important that he had to neatly fold and sort all his clothes before setting them into the laundry hamper. Like she just didn't get it

Jonathan, however, just laughs.

"Don't apologize, Steve—it's not bad. It's just...not what I'm used to. It's nice, actually. It'd be great to live somewhere like that. And not have to spend 20 minutes in the morning wondering what pile of crap your car keys got lost under."

From the depths of his pockets, Steve feels his fingers unclench and he allows himself to breathe.

“You’ve been late for work, haven’t you?” he smirks.

Jonathan hums.

“Only once."

Steve raises a singular brow and Jonathan squirms, relenting.

“Fine._ Twice._ Or maybe three times. Will has this habit of tossing the mail onto the nearest surface when he comes into the kitchen, and I have the same habit regarding my keys.”

"Looking for a roomie? My counters are mail free and I got a spare couch," Steve jokes easily.

There’s a laugh and smile and another slouchy Jonathan shrug.

"Yeah, but your bed is nicer.”

And there it was again: the same unfamiliar tightness clawing at Steve’s chest again. Only this time, he almost feels like he can't even breathe.

"Anyways, wanna watch a movie?" Jonathan then asks. Like he's unaffected and unfazed and not even remotely aware of how he keeps throwing Steve into these awful paralyzing moments of panic. Of how his brain keeps short circuiting and all he can think about is Jonathan, Jonathan, _Jonathan _and—

"Steve?"

Steve feels the tightness in his chest lurch and he's freed from his trance. A movie?

"Yeah, sure man. Sounds great."

\---

They watch Singin’ in the Rain. It’s a movie that Jonathan tells him he fell in love with while living in New York and it’s weird and unexpected because it’s totally not a movie that Steve would have pegged Jonathan ever liking. It's filled with old Hollywood faces, with those warm easily recognizable golden era motifs. There was no violence, no mystifying twists, or even gritty psychological realism. Just simple linear plots lines, like good vs. evil, and opposites attract, and stunningly choreographed dance routines. It’s admittedly not something Steve would have ever considered watching either, let alone liking, but he quickly falls into silence, absorbed by the likes of Gene Kelly and the always beautiful Debbie Reynolds, Jonathan’s distracting closeness, or the way he sits with his legs sprawled out against the length of the couch be damned.

Which of course all goes to hell when half way through the film Jonathan fully leans into him, pressing the curve of his cheek firmly against his shoulder.

As Don Lockwood goes in for a second kiss to doe-eyed Kathy Selden in the California downpour, Jonathan murmurs: “I really like this scene—the dance number coming up is considered iconic.”

And he just stays there. Pressed against his shoulder, curled into him, smelling of citrusy laundry soap and floral shampoo and something vaguely spicy, like cheap dollar store cologne.

Steve thinks he should ask him to move. Or maybe he should move. He could shift and lean to the right and quietly shuffle away. It wouldn’t be weird he thinks, just normal. Friends don’t cuddle one another while watching movies together, he tells himself. The space between them would be bearable then, he thinks. He wouldn’t have Jonathan tucked against him, his bony shoulder fanned against the edge of his chest, or his hair, messy and still slightly damp, tickling the curve of his cheek.

He doesn’t. He doesn’t move and doesn’t speak and he lets Jonathan fall further into his shoulder and Steve tries not to think—about Jonathan, or the tightness in his chest, or how warm he feels and how nice this is—and when Gene Kelly smiles, bright and unnervingly blinding, Steve realizes he wants to kiss Jonathan.

And it’s not just a tightness in his chest or a panicked flutter or a heavy exhale or weird want to somehow feel him, feel his skin—it’s that he wants to kiss Jonathan and _god, _he was so stupid, so incredibly stupid, and Robin was right: he likes Jonathan. Only they weren’t dating—this wasn’t dating! Even though they did everything together, all the time, and _fuck, _Jonathan even cooks him diner—and Steve almost wants to kick himself for taking so long to realize it.

“_Fuck_,” Steve murmurs to himself, his words barely a whisper.

Next to him, Jonathan shifts closer, craning his neck to meet his gaze. “Steve?”

He spits out the closest thing he has to a logical thought that doesn’t involve him confessing his dirty little secret.

“Uh, fuck, like, I mean—this is good. The movie that is. It’s really good,” he laughs, only it sounds nervous, and Steve is nervous and Jonathan peels himself off of him, sitting up straight.

“I’m glad you like it,” he smiles warmly, and Steve feels his heart squeeze. “I was hoping that you—,”

There’s a loud crackling boom from the skies outside, and it shakes the house. From the living room window, Steve can see a sudden torrential downpour coat the glass, and it’s only when the lights flicker does Steve have a dawning realization.

“I forgot to put my laundry to dry,” he announces slowly.

It’s too late: the power flickers once more and then, the house is washed in black.

\---

He’s sitting on the floor of Jonathan’s room, bathed in the warm light of an old Coleman's kerosene lantern from the backyard shed, trying not to watch the way in which Jonathan strips his cold, wet shirt over curves of his shoulders. The fabric clings in ways unspeakable to the planes of his skin and Steve doesn't feel right and he doesn't feel okay. In fact, he feels uncomfortably rigid, as though all the bones in his body had miraculously seized and rendered him immobile.

It was that or he was just stupidly involved in watching the way Jonathan stripped out of his wet clothing.

In the shadows of the room, he’s trying very pointedly _not _to watch the ways in which the light from the lantern buries itself in the hollows of Jonathan’s cheeks—his lips, his eyes—casting warm shadows from the jut of his hip all the way up to the dip of his collarbone, shooting an unbearable breathlessness throughout all the entirety of Steve's lungs. And when Jonathan goes to push down the damp, heavy fabric of his blue jeans, it’s only then that Steve has the decency to look away.

“The phone lines are down,” Jonathan tells him, but Steve hears him only distantly.

He is drifting. And waiting. In the shadows of Jonathan’s bedroom, he is waiting for something. Anything. A sign. Or a non-sign. Of how the hell he’s supposed to navigate this situation and how the hell he was supposed to get home.

“I think my mom will just stay with Hopper. Will’s at the Wheelers’ house.”

He shouldn’t have come here. Coming here was a mistake. He should have done his laundry at the crappy coin laundromat. He shouldn’t have agreed to catch a ride with Jonathan all the way out to the outskirts of town. He shouldn’t have watched that movie with him. He shouldn’t have let Jonathan press himself against him like that. He shouldn’t have liked it.

He liked it.

He liked it so very much that he wanted to kiss him.

And in that moment, Steve realizes very quietly, very softly that he is twenty-three and living with unfulfilled dreams and fingers yellowed from too, too many cigarettes.

Inside of him, his chest hurts.

“—Steve?”

“Huh?”

He’s completely missed whatever else it was that Jonathan was telling him. He looks back to Jonathan and he’s dressed again, the shadows of his kissable collarbone unfortunately covered by a wrinkly oversized black t-shirt.

“You’re sort of out it, man. You okay?”

Steve nods.

“Yeah...yeah. It’s just the storm, that’s all. It’s pretty wild.”

Jonathan presses his lips together as if he was considering this, as if he didn’t quite believe him, but then he nods, his skepticism swallowed as he sits down cross-legged on the floor near the edge of the bed.

Steve keeps drifting. In and out of his own mind, to compartments long since locked away, to things he had long since buried. He thinks of his dreams.

Of playing for the Indiana Pacers. Of marrying the superstar actress Kathleen Turner. To the mansion in Montana. Of finally having a good relationship with his father and his family. Of actually making something out of himself. All of his dream so lofty and totally unattainable and all of them quietly accepted as so.

But if he had to dream one last time—for one last moment—he thinks it would be this: kissing Jonathan.

Across from him, Jonathan hums, fingers splayed against the scratchy flannel of his pajama bottoms as his head leans back into the edge of his mattress.

If Steve had to dream of something—of anything—these days, it would also be this: Jonathan kissing him back.

And maybe it’s because he’s already running with a score of big fat zero in the first inning of his life, but he figures he doesn’t have much to lose. He didn’t get the dream job, or the dream wife, or the dream house, or even the dream dad, but fuck—what’s one more dream to add to the list of things he dared to dream and failed to accomplish?

Besides: it’s this, or continuing to accept a life of mediocrity. And if anything Steve was good for at least _trying_ to succeed. That he had plenty of practice at.

“Hey Jonathan—,” he starts off, and Jonathan slowly turns towards him, craning his neck in the shadows of the lamp light. He looks the same as ever, just Jonathan, slightly bored and perpetually frowning, only his cheeks are maybe a bit paler from running outside in the downpour. _He doesn't even have a clue,_ Steve thinks. About how he feels or what he's about to ask, and Steve feels himself shrink, feels himself panic, and _god, _why was everything with him so hard?

“So..._arewelikedating_?”

He ends up blurting it out in one quick, fumbled breath, with no grace and no tact.

_Shit._

Instantly, he feels his cheeks flush red and his heart in his chest starts pounding so hard that it hurts, and _god _he could just _die._

Across from him, Jonathan just blinks.

The feeling in Steve's stomach spreads—the dying feeling, that is—and Steve runs a nervous hand through his hair, because _shit, fuck, _that isn’t what he had meant to ask. Well it was, but not like that and _man, he was so bad at this. _So, so bad.

He doesn't get it. It wasn't like this with Nancy. Or Trixie. Or anyone else, really.

Maybe it's just because he likes Jonathan so much and the impending potential of blunt rejection scares him. They were just friends, he keeps telling himself. Friends who do everything together and like, don't even try to get dates with other people. And it’s been like 9 months, Steve thinks, since he broke up with Trixie. 9 months. Or maybe it's because he never thought of himself as someone who could like men. It's that, he thinks. Definitely that, and not the idea that he's just ruined the best thing to happen to his life in Hawkins in a really long time.

“I just meant that, uh—,” he tries again to fill in the gaping silence. “We spend a lot of time together. Like _a lot,_ and I know your favorite type of pizza—which let me tell you, it _sucks_. And I know all the bands you listen to, even if the radio in your car cuts out all the time, and you cook me dinner sometimes, which is great, but Robin said that Friday nights are important, because its prime date night, and—,” He’s rambling now and he realizes this. He also vaguely realizes that in the interim, Jonathan has leaned forward on his knees and was closing the space between them. Like quickly. Really quickly. Steve panics further and quickly sucks in a breath of air. He nearly knocks his head against the bookshelf behind him when he shrinks backs, and the tightness in his chest was unbearable now, just _awful_, because _what the hell was even happening?_

What the hell was Jonathan doing?

In a split second, Jonathan pulls him back, cupping a cool hand to the curve of his cheek and he presses his lips against his own. It feels wonderful, Steve thinks. Sudden and slightly breathy and chaste and all too short and then the 5 seconds is up and Jonathan pulls back.

_Shit. _That was—

That was. Well. It was—

“Steve?” Jonathan asks tentatively, and Steve realizes that _shit_ he still hasn’t said anything, he still hasn’t even _moved_, let alone kiss Jonathan back and he blinks.

Jonathan had just kissed him. Jonathan Byers had actually kissed him.

This wasn't a dream was it? His fingers press softly against his lips and he realizes _nope—not a dream_: his lips were still slightly warm and wet.

“So remember when you said you were thinking of making a go of it as a prostitute because you were _so_ good at sex?” Jonathan suddenly drawls. He doesn't even give Steve a chance to respond. “I think you should reconsider: kissing you was like kissing a corpse.”

It’s enough to snap Steve back into reality, and he feels his cheeks colour brightly.

“Oh fuck off, dude—you just startled me, that’s all: I kiss like a pro!”

And Jonathan just snorts, loud and ugly and in disbelief, and Steve feels himself bristle hotly—because _this _asshole thinks he can’t kiss. Which he can. He can kiss very well, thank you very much.

Jonathan was done for.

It takes all of 2 seconds for Steve to push Jonathan back flat against the floor as he crawls into his lap. He straddles him in the same way he used to straddle Nancy and Trixie and even Lola. And like Nancy and Trixie and even Lola, Jonathan’s eyes go wide, like _oh, okay, _and Steve just smirks, predatory almost, because if there's one thing he's good at, it was kissing. Kissing and making small talk. But the small talk part wasn't really so important right now.

His boasting aside, Steve _really_ just wants to kiss Jonathan. Like properly this time. He looks so cute, and so taken back, and _wait—_his hair. Steve has always wanted to touch it, even though it was consistently messy and hanging in his eyes and constantly begging for Steve's hand to tuck it behind his ears.

He leans down, grabbing a handful of it, and guides Jonathan’s lips to his own. And unlike the first time, Steve is more than ready.

Beneath him, Jonathan let's out a small gasp.

Kissing Jonathan is different in ways Steve can’t fully explain. His lips aren't soft and the line of his jaw isn't smooth and he pushes back against him in the same way Steve pushes forward, lips pulling and tugging and pressing for dominance. It’s sort of hot, Steve thinks, to have someone push back so much—and to be able to roughly shove Jonathan back down to the ground with the press of his lips? With no fear of him breaking? Even better. What surprises him the most however, is how Jonathan's hips buck up against the weight of Steve's thighs as his fingers sneak up under the bunched fabric of his shirt, his fingers warm and frantic against the cool of his skin. It's no moan, but it makes Steve smirk nonetheless.

When Steve finally pulls back and sits up, resting his thighs tight against the curve of Jonathan’s hips, the other man is breathless. Mutedly, Jonathan blinks a few times in that awfully familiar post-make out haze, unmoving beyond the deep rise and fall of his chest.

“Well?” Steve smirks. “Do you still think I kiss like a corpse?”

Jonathan lets out a small laugh, groaning.

“Don’t mention corpses, Steve—you’re killing my erection.”

Beneath him, Jonathan wiggles his hips upwards again and Steve bits his lip. Oh. _Oh. _

“Uh..._shit._ Do you want me to...get off of you?"

Again, Jonathan just laughs and presses his lips thin, trying—and failing—to contain his amusement.

"Is this how you seduce all the people in your life? Politely asking if you should stop once you turn them on?"

Steve frowns. "Okay, first off—_no._ Secondly, this is all new to me, so cut me some slack, Mister-I-sucked-a-dick-in-New-York.”

“It was more than one," Jonathan informs him ever so politely.

Steve snorts.

“I _knew_ you sucked off the deli owner!”

His comment earns him a small punch to the chest and sardonic, albeit soft: “You _wish_, Harrington.”

He doesn’t really, because he doesn’t want to think about Jonathan being with anyone but himself (not Tony, not the phantom deli-owner who had somehow become the butt end of all their jokes, not even Nancy) but he hides his creeping jealousy with a quick laugh, slipping off of Jonathan’s waist regardless. He ignores the other man’s curious stare and takes another quick, deep breath—_you can do this, Steve—_and braces for impact. Kissing was nice and all, but what he really wants to do is talk.

“So not to ruin the mood or anything, but…”

“_But_?”

“But...what is this?”

Next to him, Jonathan sits up off the floor, pulling down his shirt and annoying the _hell_ out of him with one of his very easy going, very nonchalant shrugs. And _god_, Steve could just strangle him at times.

“What do _you_ think this is?” Jonathan asks, and _yep—_Steve knew he was definitely going to strangle him. Only maybe not right now. Strangling the guy he had just made out with wasn’t exactly on the table at the moment. But tomorrow? It was totally an idea he was willing to act upon.

“I think...we’re friends,” he starts off slowly, and when Jonathan raises a lone, inquisitive brow, Steve rolls his eyes, giving him a light shove to the shoulder. “Lemme finish, asshole. I think we’re friends...who hang out a lot.”

“Friends who hang out a lot and just made out,” Jonathan clarifies, and Steve feels his cheeks begin to burn.

“I swear to god Jonathan, I _will _strangle you.”

“Sorry,” the other smiles quietly, and Steve takes a deep, deep breath, willing himself to continue.

“We’re friends—who just made out,” he says giving Jonathan a very pointed look, and he watches as the other smirks. “And I think...I think I like you as more than just a friend,” he finishes, swallowing down his nerves.

Yep. There it was. The truth: said out loud, and a very momentous occasion indeed because if Steve was to somehow turn back time and have a conversation with his seventeen year old self about how he would one day be confessing his feelings to another man on the floor of his high school rivals bedroom—well, he’s pretty sure his seventeen year old self would have balked at him and tried kicked his ass. You made out with _who?_ Jonathan _fucking_ Byers? Dude—that’s so gay. Dude—_you’re _so gay. _Yeah_…his seventeen year old self was kind of a shithead.

But the thing was, he was surprisingly okay with it now. The whole, you-just-kissed-a-guy thing. The whole, you-may-be-a-little-bit-gay thing. It was like, the ultimate example of character growth, and Steve suddenly wishes that his old English teacher was here so he could shove his burgeoning grasp on Mr. Jenkin’s shittily taught literary devices straight in his stupid mustachioed faced.

But then Jonathan (of course) has to go ahead and say something incredibly sarcastic and ruins Steve’s moment of triumph.

“Well I’d really hope so, Steve, otherwise I’d be questioning why the hell your tongue was just down my throat a few minutes ago.”

And there it is again—that same, uncontrollable laughter he experienced from that very first day he was reintroduced to Jonathan friggin' Byers in the Hawkins downtown city library. It blooms from his chest in short, booming waves and very quickly consumes him completely, sending him off into a fit of giggles. Fucking Jonathan—like _no shit, dude. Would there really be any other reason as to why I was grinding on you?_

He's okay with it though, because even though he's gasping for air, for the first time in a long time, he feels like he can breathe.

And it's a good feeling. Great even. Even if Jonathan was looking at him like he's gone completely nuts.

The laughter only stops when Jonathan kisses him again, aggressive and quick and murmuring heavy into his mouth about how Steve really needs to learn how to shut up sometimes.

And oh, right—

“Steve?”

“Mhmm?”

“I think I like you too.”

\---

Later, when he gets home the next day, he calls Robin in New York, only to be picked up by her sing-song voice on the answering machine.

“So you’re not going to believe this Rob’,” he says, talking excitedly into the receiver, the silence of the answering machine be damned. “But you were right. Guess who kissed me last night? And guess whose bed I woke up in this morning? Call me when you get back from class.”

He hangs up, biting his lip and feeling stupidly excited, and doesn’t even care when he can’t get his car to start when he heads out for work later that day.

When Robin calls him back later that evening, she shrieks into the phone and calls Steve an idiot and laughs and makes him say again that: yes, Robin, you were _right, _and Steve grins wider than he’s ever grinned before, even if Robin was sort-of, kind-of being a brat.

“Does he kiss well? Did you like it? Tell me what you liked the best!”

Steve chuckles and sucks in a breath, because he doesn’t even know where to really start, or how to begin, but he just knows that he liked it and that Jonathan? Well he just liked Jonathan.

“It was just…great, Robin. All of it. All of it was great,” he decides upon and when Robin hums, Steve can picture her smiling.

“But can I say one little thing, Steve?”

“What’s that, Rob’?”

Through the crackling of the phone line, there’s a poorly concealed snicker.

“Your taste in men _sucks. _Jonathan? Out of all the guys you could have chosen to get a crush on you chose _Jonathan?”_

Even though Robin was over a 1000 miles away, Steve knew she was sporting a shit-eating grin. Steve sniffs.

“Oh, shut up,” he chides. “Remember Tammy Thompson? Or what about that Rebecca girl?”

Their conversation dissolves into an argument as to who has better taste in men (and women), with the ultimate winner left undecided. And when he finally hangs up the phone some hours later, Robin has made plans to come home for Christmas early this year, because she just _has _to see Jonathan and Steve in action, as though the entirety of their non-existent, one day old relationship somehow hinged upon her decidedly not needed approval.

“If he breaks your heart, I’ll bust his nose,” she sagely informs him.

“_Robin_.”

“I’m sorry, Steve,” she giggles. “But really—I’m happy for you. Really happy. Even if you did choose to fall for guy like Jonathan Byers.”

\---

As a pair, they’re stretched out on the hood of Jonathan’s car, watching the clouds crawl by in between puffs of cigarette smoke and sips of lukewarm beer. The quarry is really pretty this time of year, with the surrounding hillsides awash in bursts of vibrant reds and deep yellows. Jonathan always snaps a few pictures before they stretch out, and in between familiar songs cracking through on the AM radio, they lapse into quiet, comfortable conversation.

Since that night in Jonathan’s bedroom, nothing between them had changed really. They still ate pizza together on Friday nights, they still watched old movies together, and if they were at Jonathan’s, they’d fold their laundry while doing it. Steve was still learning how to cook, and every once and a while Jonathan would stay the night. The only real difference was that now they sometimes touched one another (okay—so like _all_ the time), because it was just _nice_ to be able to sneak up behind Jonathan while he was cooking them supper and wrap his arms around his waist. Oh, and Steve had experienced giving his first blow job the other day (which was a mess, and he nearly choked a few times, but it was satisfyingly hot when he finally made Jonathan come during the climax of the latest John Carpenter thriller).

But beyond that?

Everything was basically the same. Just with more touching. And kissing. And you know...bedroom stuff. Which wasn’t as strange as Steve thought it would be, but it was definitely something new to him, but not all that different.

“Weirdest thing that’s ever turned you on,” Jonathan asks, taking a slow sip of his beer, and next to him, Steve hums.

"Your laundry detergent,” he decides upon easily. “I got hard the first time I did laundry at your house after sniffing it.”

“Really?” Jonathan grins, and Steve just nods, blinking slowly. Jonathan sidles up next to him, tucking his head on the curve of Steve’s shoulder, draping an arm across his stomach. He’s learned Jonathan is a cuddler—he loves to cuddle—and he’s the worst at night. It’s almost like sleeping next to a clingy 4-limbed octopus.

“What about now?”

Steve pulls him in closer, taking a deep whiff of the collar of his sherpa-lined jacket and frowns.

“You smell like cigarettes and your mom’s floral shampoo,” Steve chuckles. “Sorry Jon, but its Surf or nothing for me.”

Jonathan lets out a quiet laugh, his fingers thrumming gently across the clothed planes of his abdomen.

“For me it was when you joked about becoming a prostitute. _Or_ the way you pull on your lower lip whenever you were concentrating really hard on something,” he admits.

“Like this?” Steve asks, waggling his eyebrows with his teeth pulling at his lips.

Jonathan cranes his head upwards and snorts.

“Not at all, Steve—you look mildly constipated with that face.”

“You’re an ass,” Steve murmurs, but leans in, brushing his lips against the crown of Jonathan’s forehead.

"Yep."

“But you’re my ass,” Steve amends and Jonathan hums, hiding his smile in the folds of Steve's jacket. Then: “Oh, I forgot about your work uniform!”

"At the diner?"

"More times than I can count,” Steve smiles, and he really means it. “Something about that tiny black apron on your waist—I’m glad we started hanging out at my apartment. It was easier to hide there.”

“You’re not allowed to go back there now,” Jonathan teases. “I can’t have you ordering your shitty coffee and knowing that you’re basically perving on me.”

His comment earns Jonathan a light jab to his chest and soft _ow _in return.

“Oh, and I talked to my landlord,” Steve suddenly announces. Next to him, Jonathan perks up, tilting his gaze upwards. “He said it’s cool if I add you to the lease come January.”

“So, I got 5 months to pack my shit,” Jonathan hums.

“Yep. And 5 months to figure out how to not dump all your shit on the counter when walking in the door.”

Jonathan snorts.

“Pizza tomorrow?” Steve suddenly asks, as if it was a real question.

“Only if my half doesn’t have pineapple.”

“Deal.”

Steve exhales deeply, smiling as the clouds overhead continue to drift by. He was washed up. Twenty-three. With a dead end job. But he has a love life and _some_ plans for his future, which hey—was more than he had four months ago at the beginning of summer. Who knows: maybe he’ll even get that mansion in Montana one day, or hell, that Dad who loves to play catch with his son in the park.

He almost snorts, because yeah, _right._

He tries not to laugh, but it’s a losing battle, because he knows that some dreams aren’t ever meant to come true. Some dreams were just too damn fantastical to even fathom outside long, lingering moments while taking a hot shower.

But Jonathan? Well. Jonathan was just that prick who stole his girlfriend back in high school and didn’t like dogs and ate his pizza with ranch and sometimes forgot that Steve had trouble understanding him when he talked about the stuff he learned in New York, like as if Steve had had the luxury of being there himself.

It didn’t matter though, because Steve Harrington—the jock, the hair, the face, the car, the name: all of it—all the identifying monikers—wouldn’t have it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> Summerland is still in the works, but it's slooooow going due to work and online classwork. This was something I also had been plugging away for a while on the side, so I hope you enjoyed it - leave me a comment below if you did :)


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